Did Somebody Say Indiana Jones?

CALL OF THE WILD Josh Bernstein describing his far-flung adventures at the Explorers Club. Credit
Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times

AHUSH fell over the standing-room-only crowd at the Explorers Club in Manhattan on Feb. 5. In a room whose dark-paneled walls are hung with flags once planted in the far-flung precincts of Everest and Antarctica, the man at the lectern had just finished talking about his anthropological travels through almost 40 countries, across some 500,000 miles, where he recovered from food poisoning and chigger bites in Peru and swam through shark-infested waters off Easter Island.

Any questions?

“Do you want to have children?” asked a well-groomed youngish woman, who sat attentively with a few dozen of her peers and a smattering of schoolchildren and older people.

Not missing a beat, the lecturer, Josh Bernstein, the star of “Digging for the Truth” on the History Channel, flashed his square-toothed snow-white smile and assured the crowd — which included the most women ever to attend a lecture there, the club’s manager said — that, yes, he would like to be a father someday and, no, he’s not dating anyone right now.

Murmurs of approval and titters of laughter followed, with more questions: Does he intend to settle down?

Later, clutching Mr. Bernstein’s book, “Digging for the Truth” (Gotham), urban women with thousand-dollar handbags lined up for the autograph of a man who prefers an ice cave to a glassy penthouse. His car is a 1982 Toyota Land Cruiser that runs on vegetable oil. His jeans are made with organic cotton. In one program that tests the authenticity of the Holy Grail, he dons chain mail and jousts in Southern France. In another he chariots in Greece while shooting a bow and arrow.

“I feel like I should touch him to see if he’s real,” whispered Rosina Seydel, 40, a tall, youthful and blond real estate agent from Atlanta, who attended a second talk at the Explorers Club on March 28, a “fireside chat” for members.

Ms. Seydel was there as a guest of Tee Faircloth, an Explorers Club member who is a friend of Mr. Bernstein’s and the owner of F. M. Allen, the safari outfitter on Madison Avenue. “Could he be that good looking and that smart and charming?” she said, her eyes locked on Mr. Bernstein.

Yes, dear reader. Or at least his largely female fan base thinks so.

Mr. Bernstein, 36, is an anthropologist and Cornell graduate. He is the host of a program that explores mysteries like the lost cities of Atlantis and El Dorado. He travels to location by camel or paraglider or with oxygen tanks and flippers, sometimes braving natural disasters and parasites.

Last Monday, during his finale on the History Channel, Mr. Bernstein explored Aztec civilization and human sacrifice.

He is a member of both the Explorers, whose membership roster included Theodore Roosevelt, and the Royal Geographic Society in London, where Charles Darwin and Ernest Shackleton were members. His official fan club numbers 1,700.

For two of its three seasons, “Digging for the Truth” was the History Channel’s No. 1 series, said Lynn Gardner, the station’s publicity director. When his three-year contract was up, he was poached by the Discovery Channel, which has more viewers. His as-yet-unnamed program, to begin in January, will include Mr. Bernstein’s usual pursuits of anthropological and archaeological subjects, as well as another of his passions, the environment.

Photo

Josh Bernstein onscreen.

All in a day’s work, with no two days the same, he said.

“I’m the luckiest guy in the world, given my work,” Mr. Bernstein said, as he guided chopsticks into monkfish in oyster sauce and sipped a litchi martini at Chinatown Brasserie, in Lower Manhattan.

On the air he says, with a serious look, “We’re digging for the truth, and we’re going to extremes to do it.” But in person, he is self-deprecating, once joking during a lecture that he needed “three cans of Red Bull to get up the nerve” to navigate some raging rapids. He can also be poignant. He e-mailed his fans to share his heartbreak at the death of the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin.

For his own risks, Mr. Bernstein said, he triple-checks every knot and loop when he paraglides or rappels, adding, “I’m not cavalier, and I don’t have a death wish.”

He has the manners of an earlier era. When Angela Schuster, the editor of Icon, an architectural preservation magazine published by the World Monuments Fund, introduced herself during cocktail hour at the Explorers, Mr. Bernstein promptly fetched her a drink before ordering one for himself.

His program, too, has a retro appeal: no shooting, no swearing and no provocative babes, unless you count wall paintings of Nefertiti. Mr. Bernstein said, “We’d get letters saying, ‘This is the only show we watch together as a family.’ ”

That’s not the only response to the swashbuckling, cowboy-hatted Mr. Bernstein.

“Some women send me nude photos of themselves, yeah, and I don’t mind that,” he said, grinning as he tucked into dim sum. “I also get the letters, some men write and tell me we’d be the perfect couple, and that’s O.K. But I just don’t play for that team.”

Reflecting a couple of days after Mr. Bernstein’s talk in March, Ms. Seydel said his looks are a lure.

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“He looks good, so that gets your interest,” she said. “But then you hear what he has to say, and that’s what’s really interesting.”

Before all the globetrotting, Mr. Bernstein was rooted on the Upper East Side, where he was raised in a fairly typical upper-middle-class Jewish household. But he long had a passion for nature.

“I had a tracking box in my bedroom,” he said. Huh? “That’s a box of sand that I walked in, pretending I was an animal. That determined how my tracks would look if I turned or walked backward.” It helped him, he said, to understand the nuances of animal movement.

For all his rugged handsomeness, Mr. Bernstein is that kind of geek. As a teenager at Horace Mann School, he was a faithful reader of two major newspapers, as well as three or four environmental magazines. He clipped articles on the environment and politics and put them in plastic sleeves before cataloging them by subject in binders.

As children, he and his twin brother, Andy (who is now a corporate consultant), went to Camp Winaukee in New Hampshire, where Josh mastered bow and arrow and Andy the BB gun. Their parents divorced when the boys were 5. They lived primarily with their mother and visited their father in Bedford, N.Y. But in 1986, weeks before Mr. Bernstein turned 15, his father died of a heart attack. Seemingly overnight, he said, he grew up.

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CONCRETE AND OTHER JUNGLES Josh Bernstein, the host of Digging for the Truth, in Lower Manhattan.Credit
Marvi Lacar for The New York Times

“While my classmates were comparing their new BMWs and trying to sneak into the city’s coolest bars with their fake IDs, I was coming to terms with life without my father,” Mr. Bernstein wrote.

In his later teenage years, Mr. Bernstein, a Clint Eastwood fan, fell in love with the American West. In summers he attended a wilderness ranch in Wyoming and learned desert survival and primitive living in Utah with the Boulder Outdoor Survival School.

At Cornell, he double-majored in anthropology and psychology and was the president of his fraternity (Pi Kappa Alpha). He spent a year in Jerusalem and considered rabbinical school but said the pull of the outdoor life was stronger.

He returned instead to the survival school at Boulder, Colo., becoming its marketing director and expanding its staff and programs until a downturn in the economy after Sept. 11 shuttered the place. But as the pitchman for the school, Mr. Bernstein attracted attention. He made a demo tape for a survival show of his own. It caught the eye of Peggy Kim, who was the programming director at the History Channel, and he was hired in 2004.

Ms. Schuster, the magazine editor who listened to Mr. Bernstein’s talk at the Explorers Club, conceded that Mr. Bernstein is “entertaining and charming,” but she described the program as light.

“I think if you’re in the field, a lot of the ‘gee whiz’ in the show isn’t so ‘gee whiz,’ ” said Ms. Schuster, a former senior editor at Archaeology. “There’s so much cool research out there, but I’m not sure how much of it is getting into the show.”

The History Channel, which is losing Mr. Bernstein, said his program had dropped to its fourth most watched. “The numbers aren’t where we want them to be right now, and we’re going in a whole new direction with the new show,” said Ms. Gardner, the publicity director.

Mr. Bernstein said he is looking for more substance in his new Discovery Channel program and wants to deepen its message by covering ecological issues in a smart and urgent way.

“We create a tremendous amount of waste,” Mr. Bernstein said. “We’re creating a greater environmental debt that we’re going to have to pay. And that’s not sustainable, and it’s highly problematic. I hope that my new show will address those realities.”

Mr. Bernstein, who keeps an apartment in Manhattan for the few days a year when he is home, left on April 6 for the filming of the first episode of his Discovery Channel series. Under orders from his bosses, he was keeping the first location secret.

Yes, he does think about settling down sometime, which will influence whether or not he continues to be so far-flung.

“When you meet the right person, you make changes,” he said.

And the right person is?

“I’m attracted to tall blondes,” he said, laughing. “It isn’t easy to find a tall blond Jewish girl who is interested in the environment.”

Correction: April 29, 2007

An article last Sunday about Josh Bernstein, the star of the television show “Digging for the Truth,” referred incorrectly to the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, where he was a student and is chief executive officer. Although a post-9/11 downturn caused layoffs, the school did not close.